Customer Service Feedback

Every organization should ask themselves What is good customer service? and create their own definition for good customer service based on the answer they come up with. Giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback on their customer experience is one way to improve customer service quality, but only if the customer feedback gets back to the employees. Lots of organizations use customer service surveys to measure customer experiences and customer loyalty. What separates the organizations with mediocre customer service from the organizations with excellent customer service is sharing the feedback from the customer loyalty surveys with the employees. Seems pretty straight forward, right?

I suggest you take it a step further, however. While sharing the aggregate results of customer feedback surveys with front-line employees is important, you can use these customer surveys as assessments of employee performance or staff evaluations. If you're not already using customer surveys to support this type of employee performance feedback, here are some steps from the CRMBuyer to make this type of process possible:

• Move from random survey sampling to an attempted census. Random survey samples are great when you're just trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction rates. However, if you're trying to collect feedback to figure out how to improve employee performance, a random sample is unlikely to provide enough data for each employee. Like with all other types of surveys, not everyone you send personalized survey invitations to will participate, but you will likely get enough responses to support the employee assessments.

• Develop new employee reports. To improve workforce performance, organizations can't continue to provide infrequent high-level survey reports. Instead, employees should get to see weekly reports. Using standardized reports that compare the employee to the overall average and to their colleagues as a group have the most impact.

• Develop new management reports. Like with how employees see the customer feedback reports needs to change with this strategy, management reports do too. Managers should be able to see responses by employees so they can take appropriate action. Managers will have different opinions on how much information should be shared with their staff; some will want to share every customer comment from the employee performance evaluation form, others wont want to share individual survey results.

• Develop HR guidelines for the use of these employee reports. The HR department should be deeply involved in the creation of these HR employee appraisal forms and employee survey reports. If an employee constantly receives negative customer feedback, the organization may choose to terminate their employment so it helps to keep HR in the loop. However, that shouldn't be the goal of this type of customer survey program. The survey feedback should be used to improve employee job performance and mentor them. With the help of customer service assessment surveys and employee performance review forms organizations can figure out how to improve customer service quality.

Today we're continuing our count down of our top five posts. Today's theme? You guessed it customer, client and consumer surveys.

• Don't Just Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Also Collect User Satisfaction Feedback: In this post, we talk about how the purchaser and the user are not always the same person. So when you review your customer feedback procedures and customer survey best practices, make sure you consider who you're surveying: the purchaser, the user or both.

• Customer Service Feedback To Increase Customer Loyalty: Customers have higher standards for organizations than 20 years ago. We all want more, more more! In this post, we talk about the importance of good customer service and how to boost your customer service satisfaction survey scores.

• What's Your Customer Satisfaction Score? This post debunks the myth that customer service is the defining factor in client satisfaction. Customers switch to competitors, become repeat customers, and recommend products and services based on their overall satisfaction experience, not just customer service experiences.

• Classify Customers: Are They Secure, Satisfied/Favorable, Vulnerable Or Dissatisfied? Typically, client survey best practices say there are four distinct customer satisfaction categories: secure, satisfied, vulnerable and dissatisfied. It's important to classify customers into these groups and uncover similarities in each group. Why? Because it will help you identify new revenue opportunities.

• Customer Reviews Matter: 6 Reasons Why: It's common knowledge that customer and consumer reviews have become an important part of the decision making process. As the title suggests, the post takes a deeper look at why reviews are more important than we think they are.

Do you listen to customer complaints? Who do the come from? If I had to guess, I would say they're probably coming from the user. In the B2B world, the user is not always the same person that signed the agreement and purchased your product or service. So when you review your customer feedback procedures and customer survey best practices, make sure you consider who you're surveying: the purchaser, the user or both?

Both groups will have a different perspective. Those who hold the purse strings are often going to focus on results: is your offering saving them money; is it producing measurable results; is it solving the problem? On the other hand, while the end user may share some of these concerns, they're more likely to be focused on the usability: is it hard to use; do I need a lot of help from product support; is customer service responsive and helpful; is it making my job easier?

Organizations should seek customer feedback through user surveys, particularly if they do not have a way to pass feedback through the organization from sales and customer service to product development to management. Even though the purchaser may be happy and seeing high ROI from your offering, the user may bang their head against the wall to make it achieve those results. Soon as a competitor enters the market, the user is likely to push for a change.

Depending on your survey goals, a customer feedback survey form may look very similar to a user survey, including similar goals. The key is who your survey respondents are. That's information you should have in your customer database. Collecting names, emails and additional contact information is sometimes the biggest hurdle for survey programs. From there, writing survey questions and building questionnaires in online survey software tools should all be downhill.

As a leading online survey software company, we are always answering questions about survey best practices. Even scaled questions, or interval question types, come with a lot of questions:


When you're designing your survey questions, steer clear of using negative numbers in scales. Research has shown that people do not like to give negative ratings when completing surveys. This means, if you use a negative scale, you're adding bias to your survey data. You're going to push people more towards the neutral point or higher on the scale. When you're creating the question, it doesn't seem like using negative numbers in your likert type question would have an impact because each point still has the same arbitrary value. However, there's a psychological effect.

Think of it this way: you're taking a customer satisfaction survey asking for customer service feedback. You were less than satisfied with the experience, but you're rating the person who helped you and know that it will reflect on them. Chances are you're not going to want to assign a negative number to them so you'll give them the lowest non-negative score (Average). It's not reflective of how you really feel, but you don't feel they did a negative job.

The scale values seem like a little thing, but they can have a big impact on your online web survey. Each step in survey building is important to think about right down to the flow of your survey questions.

Looking for more online survey best practices? Sign up for one of our 30 minute best practice webinars and start improving your web based surveys.

Are your survey scales balanced? Typically when you think of survey questions using a scale, you think of each point holding the same amount of weight with the same number of options on either side of the middle point.


However, sometimes people don't stick to this surveying rule of thumb and lean towards using unbalanced scales. Here are a couple cons to using unbalanced scales and reasons why you should use balanced scales:

• Unbalanced survey scales create bias data: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Unsatisfied. What about people who are Very unsatisfied? It makes the data look better than it may actually be.

• Unbalanced scales can be frustrating for the survey respondent. If someone is very unsatisfied, they want to mark they are very unsatisfied in your customer survey. Not allowing them to tell you how they feel could make them just abandon the survey all together.

• Balanced scales give the surveyor more analysis options than unbalanced scales. While this is a topic for a seperate post, many people will apply numbered interval scales to balanced scales for the purpose of completing their survey analysis. Interval scales give a wider range of analysis potential over ordinal survey question types.

That said, unbalanced scales can be useful when you know there will be an overwhelming response in a specific direction. A good example is customer services feedback surveys or employee surveys about benefits. Take these sample survey question:


I urge you to seriously think about why you want to use an unbalanced scale. If used inappropriately, they could quickly bias your data.

If you're beginning to plan your next survey project, I encourage you to attend our webinar on best practices for conducting web surveys. Then when the time comes, our professional survey services team would be happy to consult with you on your questionnaire design to flush out any question issues like this one.

Are you an good listener? Hearing and understanding what's being said in a conversation isn't rocket science, most people can do it. However, not everyone can hear a complaint or feedback and understand how it applies to their organization or how to implement a solution. However, before those two steps, you have to be willing to accept maybe the customer feedback is right - and what you've previously believed is wrong. Here's an example of what I mean:


Over at Esteban Kolsky's A Passion For Customer Service blog, he gave his three secrets for effective listening. Here are his customer service tips:

1. There are two sides to the conversation. Esteban points out that not everyone provides feedback because they want to be listened to or be answered. Sometimes submitting a complaint just makes you feel better and releases some of the frustration you have with an organization's customer service. He suggests that you still listen to this feedback, but don't prioritize it above those customers who call for a specific action or change.

2. Focus on what's being said, not how. The channel someone chooses to give customer feedback shouldn't matter. Hopefully, you're trying to gather employee, client and customer service feedback through various channels - web surveys, Twitter, blogs, other social media, customer service calls, etc. Accept the methods customers and clients choose to provide feedback. To improve you need to be where they are and not always expect them to come to you.

3. Respond and act on feedback. We've talked about this topic before on this blog. Asking and accepting feedback sets expectations that you're going to follow up. It is tough. Like I said in the beginning, you need to be humble enough to admit you could do it better and the customer may know how you could do it better. Esteban points out that customer engagement increases dramatically when organizations "close the loop" and implement changes based on feedback.

I think it's important to question the feedback as well. I don't mean this in the sense that you should question the credibility of the source or decide the person isn't qualified to provide feedback. But you should ask why they feel this way. While they may be complaining about something small, it may be a much bigger issue. In this case, acting on their request just at face value wont be solving the problem at all.

Although the Twitter talk has slowed down some, there's still a lot of buzz around how organizations should use Twitter as a resource for customer service, customer feedback, lead generation, etc.

How are you using Twitter?

I think Twitter is a great way to collect customer feedback. I'm still unsure about using Twitter for customer service, because if you do it wrong - it could really hurt your organization's reputation. Make sure you evaluate whether or not it even makes sense for your product. But the most important thing organizations need to understand when it comes to social media is that the conversation is going on - whether you're a part of it or not. It doesn't matter if you have customer survey software and conduct customer questionnaires online or off. The internet has made sharing information with peers so easy, of course it's going to happen and you need to monitor it. Ignoring potential feedback because it's not within your chosen method (ex. surveys online or feedback forms within your restaurant or store) would be silly. With that in mind, don't ever try to control the conversation, customers will not appreciate it and will likely kick you out of the conversation.

So how do you manage feedback and not let it spiral out of control? (See this post about Motrin Moms or #AmazonFail on Twitter for examples.) That's a great question, and I'm not sure anyone has a one size fits all solution. Social media doesn't have a one size fits all solution, each organization needs to figure out their own strategy. For how you deal with feedback, it's the same. You need to set your own rules for what requires action and what does not. My recommendation is if your share of the conversation is small it may be beneficial to take part in as much of the conversation as possible. This means when someone says something both good and bad about your organization. But do not over react to bad feedback. If you get bad feedback, maybe there's a process you need to look at and fix or it's just that someone doesn't like you. If you get bad feedback that you think is unfair, try to follow up in a non-defensive way to understand the problem so you can fix it. Chances are if you solve the problem, you'll receive praise for it, not more hate. Social Media users tend to share the good feedback as well as the bad, which flips the belief that significantly more bad news is shared than good. There's still an imbalance, but it's getting leveler.

My point: Twitter, and other social media platforms, are a great source for customer feedback for customer service feedback to product feedback to any other type of feedback. These resources should be included in your tool box.

Like customer service feedback, product research survey questions that target enhancement requests and ideas are critical for organizations - B2B, B2C and B2G alike. So my question is how do you gather product enhancement requests? I have a couple ideas, and I hope you'll share yours as well. Traditional ways may include enhancement request forms your customer care team completes if a customer makes a suggestion during a help session or front-line employees giving feedback to the developers during a meeting. But perhaps conducting a product evaluation survey among product users might be a good place to start. It's difficult to ask people who are not customers to provide feedback on your offering - let alone provide enhancement requests. It's also a pretty safe bet that some of your customers, if not a lot of them, have some great ideas for how you can improve your offering.

If you do go with some type of customer survey, the question maybe be how do you do it and how often. I would argue the survey could be ongoing if you have customer survey software for conducting online surveys. Customer services reps could add a link to the survey in their signature. Any time a customer has an idea or feedback, they know exactly where they can go to give it. If you're a software as a service (SAAS) organization, a link can be placed somewhere behind the log in screen.

There are various ways you can solicit feedback about your offering - the important part is you do it. Your customers are the ones using your product or service. They have the greatest chance of knowing what they need and how you could satisfy a need or pain they have. I tend to think an organization's job is to solve pain - each organization may target a different pain to alleviate, but they all solve some type of pain.

However your organization decides to gather product enhancement ideas is great, but the most important part is that you ask for customers feedback and you act it. How else do you plan to continually improve your offering to stay competitive in the market place?

I would love to hear how you gather product enhancement ideas.

To copy or not to copy? One of the great features of Cvent's web survey software is the clone or copy survey feature. By copying a past survey you can save time, in not only question creation, but also in the actual graphical survey design. If you've never created an online survey - regardless of the survey application - you may not understand what a time saver this can be. Selecting the right color scheme, loading the correct images, making sure everything lines up the way you want in the web survey template can all eat up a chunk of time, and before you know it it's lunch time - or worse, the day is over and all you've done is design the graphical layout of your survey! So having a clone web survey option is - in my book - a must have. We've said before, when it comes to surveys, respondents judge a book by it's cover. And I think they should. In this wonderful world of technology, there's no excuse for having an ugly looking survey, particularly when you could be reinforcing your brand. Furthermore, ugly surveys do not make for a very good survey respondent experience.


However, I want to warn against simply copying a survey and emailing questionnaire invitations out to an email list. Why would you do that? Perhaps, you argue, you want to run the same product survey template in a different state, region, country, etc. or you want to be able to bench mark against last year's customer service feedback or job satisfaction survey. These are fair points but is there other information you realized you needed to improve your product? Was your customer questionnaire perfect? Could you improve your staff opinion survey? Of course you can! Nothing is ever perfect, and when it comes to surveying improving the quality and reliability of your survey data, you should be striving to get the strongest data possible. You're probably planning to use the data you collect to make business decisions, and with that in mind, why would you ever argue for simply copying an existing survey without evaluating the questions you asked last time and if the questionnaire could be improved?

If surveying is part of your job (HR surveys, marketing surveys, customer feedback surveys, etc.), one of the best things you can do before you creating a survey - especially if you've never done a survey project before - is to learn from others. I always take surveys when I'm asked. I'll admit my draw to taking them is because I'm curious about what they're going to ask, but I also want to see what things they're doing right and what things I should avoid.

Looking at other people's surveys are a great way to get ideas for good survey questions. If you're focus is on customer satisfaction or customer service feedback, it should be easy to put your hands on other organizations' business surveys. After all, we're all someone's customer. This is the same with marketing questionnaires or product surveys. Every once in awhile, you should fall into someone's sample. However, if you're trying to get sample survey questions for an employee evaluation feedback form, staff opinion survey or other HR survey, the internet might be your best friend.

While it's easy to get question ideas from questionnaires in the same category as the one you're working on, don't discount what you can learn from surveys in other categories. Best practices cross over categories and someone creating a customer service survey can learn a lot from an education survey.

If you're interested in learning more about survey best practices, sign up for Cvent's free webinar.

I was reading through Bruce Temkin's 6 Laws of Customer Experience (CxP) yesterday, and I was struck by how well a survey program fits in with his CxP laws. I talk about implementing online survey programs to gather customer feedback all the time, to the point that I sometimes feel like a broken record. Often though, employees are overlooked as an essential part of the customer experience especially if they aren't front-line employees. For that reason, my favorite two laws are numbers four and five:
Obviously, conducting client surveys to find their satisfaction levels is important for customer analysis, product enhancements, customer service feedback, etc., but checking in with employee's satisfaction is equally important. Here are a few of the highlights from Bruce:

Various types of employee feedback and HR surveys can include questions to evaluate how your organization is doing when it comes to fostering the correct environment for providing amazing customer experiences. A quick online survey can show management if they're doing a good job communicating organizational goals, motivating employees, boosting morale by celebrating their successes, etc. One of the best ways to measurce customer experience is to measure employee loyalty and morale using surveys.

Employees are an organization's biggest asset; but if employees aren't motivated, don't understand or are just expected to churn through tasks, they could also be your biggest liability when trying to boost customer retention. A good first step to checking in on your customer experience is to check in with your employees through some type of employee satisfaction survey.

If your organization doesn't currently conduct employee surveys or conducts paper based surveys, I'd recommend signing up for one of our online product demos or a free trial of the Cvent Web Survey software.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I value customer service. One bad experience impacts my future purchasing decisions. I'm not the only person who places value in customer service. Unfortunately for organizations, many of your customers are just like me. However, many senior managers, marketing, sales, customer service employees don't enter their jobs remembering what it's like to be a customer. Everyone is a customer, yet we all forget that's true when designing programs and interacting with our own customers. Finding out if you're doing a good job in the customer satisfaction and experience arena is simple, if you continually ask yourself:

How do your customers feel about your service?

In the past, I told you the first sign of something being wrong is the sound of customers leaving. If you don't ask them how you're doing, you're never going to find out. You may find customers think your customer service team is excellent or you may find customers dread anything going wrong and having to contact your organization. Either way, you can't improve something if you don't know and understand what your customers need. Begin developing a customer service survey program today and gather customer service feedback tomorrow.

I cannot begin to explain how frustrating I find telephone surveys. They drive me crazy. I'm always happy to share my opinions with organizations but don't waste an hour of my day on a bad telephone survey. A bad survey experience reflects on the brand. Respondent's experiences converge into the customer experience, they don't keep the buying and the surveying experiences separate in their minds.

It's easy to create a questionnaire online with web survey software and finding online survey tools that fits your needs is easy. So why are there not more online market research studies being done? Why does my phone ring every night, while I'm eating dinner, with another request to complete a telephone survey? Technology improves the respondent experience tenfold. As I hinted at above, respondent experience impacts customer experience, which influences customer loyalty and retention. If you think you need additional channels for your data collection other than online, here are a few telephone survey tips to help the respondent experience:

1. Training is essential. Make sure your interviewer is well trained and understands their job. For open ended questions, have the interviewer read back the response, ask for more details, and clarify the response they have recorded is exactly what the respondent said. Interviewer bias has a tendency to creep into open ended questions and training is the best way to combat bias.

2. Vary the question type. Asking more than a few of the same question type in a row becomes tedious for the respondent. Respondents also lose interest and you begin to lose their focus. Alter your question types to keep respondents engaged and giving honest feedback.

3. Speak English. With more and more organizations and market research agencies offshoring their telephone surveys, it's really important to ensure your interviewers speak clear English. It should not, at any point, become the respondent's responsibility to try to figure out what the interviewer is asking. Remember, you called them and asked them to help you. In most cases, the respondent isn't getting anything out of it.

4. Only ask important questions. This is a best practice for all survey types whether its a web based survey or a paper feedback form. If you don't need the answer to the question, take it out. If the question does not directly relate back to the survey project objectives, take it out. Do not ask the same question three different ways, one way is good enough. Respondents completing an online questionnaire may be more forgiving of extra questions than in a telephone survey, don't waste their time with extra questions.

The only time I recommend using telephone surveys is when you're trying to build a relationship. Asking for customer service feedback or conducting customer satisfaction surveys are excellent opportunities to take the time to call your clients. The personal touch can go a long way to improve customer retention programs and consumer loyalty.

Customers have higher standards for organizations than 20 years ago. Why? We want more. We live in a world where we want (and can usually get) everything instantly, one could argue both a blessing and a curse of the internet. As a result, customer service has become a critical part of any organization. Do you remember your last experience where you didn't feel satisfied with the resolution? I can name a handful without blinking.

You can measure all kinds of stats surrounding your customer service department: number of inbound calls, time spent on hold, call length, etc. You can also gather customer service feedback through surveys to get your customer service score. If you receive a low customer service score, here are some possible reasons:

1. Training. Organizations need to take the time to adequately train their customer service staff. If they aren't trained, they wont be able to give superior customer service because they simply wont have the necessary knowledge. Training should include explaining organizational goals and a basic understanding of all products. Obviously more extensive knowledge is needed for products they support.

2. Indifference. Some staff members just wont care. Customer service requires more than just a skill base, it also requires certain personality traits. Make sure you have a program in place to identify the correct people for your organization.

3. Burn out. It's hard to work in customer service. Reps field complaints and deal with negativity all day. How often are you in a good mood when you call customer service? Probably not very often, usually callers are already frustrated and in a bad mood. Dealing with that same negative caller over and over again will impact anyone's enthusiasm. To try to combat the effects of the complaints and negativity they face, provide recognition and incentives for excellent reps.

It's important to identify what your organization does well and needs to improve when it comes to customer service. After all, customers who receive poor service have a decreased opinion of the brand and the organization. They become much more critical and chances are soon as they have an alternative, they're going to leave. On the other hand, when customers feel they received white glove service, they tend to value the brand over competitors - isn't that the goal of all organizations?

I asked in the beginning if you remembered any bad customer service experiences. Are you still a customer? I know in most cases, I'm not. For most customers, it's not whether there was a problem, but whether it was taken care of quickly and had a satisfactory outcome. By having an excellent customer service team in place, you may find increased customer loyalty and higher customer retention rates. When was the last time you conducted a customer service survey to identify how your customer service department was doing?

Sometimes people think good customer service automatically equates to satisfied customers.  But customer service is just one factor contributing to customer satisfaction and experience.  Research shows customers switch to competitors, become repeat customers, and recommend products and services based on their overall satisfaction experience, not just customer service experiences.  This should seem pretty intuitive.  Customer satisfaction can be grouped into three categories:

• Dissatisfaction.  Customers falling into this group will not make future purchases and will probably share their negative experience with their network (costing you future customers), complain vigorously or take legal action.  If you find your experience scores fall into this category, you are probably providing bad customer service and falling short of other satisfaction categories as well.

• Indifference.  If you're seeing satisfaction survey scores fall in the indifference category, customer service feedback should be excellent.  However, other factors such as value, quality, environment, ease of use, etc. could be pulling down the overall measure of customer experience.  Good customer service can do a lot to move customers from dissatisfaction to indifference, so if your product is difficult to use having a great customer care team could save you losing customers forever.

• Loyal. Customers who are loyal find that all factors contributing to their experience with your organization are exceeding expectations.  The more these customer interact with your organization, the more loyal they become, increasing brand recommendations to their network.  Organizations with satisfaction scores falling into this group are considered "world-class" with strong reputations.

Measuring customer satisfaction is an important exercise for any organization.  Not only will it tell you where you stand now, but if you're ranking in the dissatisfaction category, you could make changes to keep customers from leaving. So what is your customer satisfaction score? 

Last week, we blogged about how conducting a survey creates expectations, whether it's a staff opinion survey or a customer service feedback form. Regarding this topic, Seth Godin's recent Direct from Consumer Marketing post caught our eye. 

In this post, Godin asks if organizations really want to hear from customers and clients—particularly if they're unhappy. If you're in the business of selling something, we assume you would respond the way Godin anticipates: of course you want to hear from them!

Still, actions speak louder than words. If you conduct a survey and ignore the responses, you send the message that you're not interested in what customers have to say.

Beginning a conversation with a client is sometimes the hardest part. Online surveys to measure customer satisfaction or gather product feedback are an ideal way to open the lines of communication and learn more about your customers. But you have to analyze the data; you have to act. You have to listen. Meet the expectations you create through a survey campaign and listen to your customers, and you'll increase customer loyalty and customer retention. 

Increased email deliverability means increased survey responses, which allows for better customer analysis or marketing research data. We recently posted a couple of tips to help improve the deliverability of your email marketing, and now we're sharing even more:

• Compelling content. ISPs monitor click-throughs and open rates, too. What does this mean? If you aren't delivering compelling content resulting in click-throughs to your online survey, your next email may be marked as spam and might never make it to the recipient’s inbox.

Deliver gripping subject lines and emails every time to help boost your response rates. This helps your current and future surveys.

• Respect respondent’s time. We cannot stress this enough. Emailing your contacts too often can trigger excess spam complaints. This does not apply to just those using email marketing for surveys, it applies to the whole organization.

If your customer service department is sending out customer service feedback forms and your marketing department is sending our promotional emails to the same contacts too often, you could be hurting your email reputation without even realizing it.

Your respondents are busy people, if they begin to hear from you too often and feel you're wasting their time, they will report you. To avoid this potential deliverability nightmare, experts recommend centralizing email lists so every email is logged and tracked.

• Use real email addresses. If you have bounces going to an email address that doesn’t exist, it's going to damage your deliverability. Including "Do not reply to this message" in your email shouldn't hurt as long as the email address you're sending from is real. But as we suggested previously, you want those replies and bounce backs to help you cleanse your list and boost deliverability.

Make sure to file these tips in your email marketing best practices folder and start using them today. You may be surprised at how a few changes could boost your response numbers.

If you've kept up with the Cvent Survey blog, you know that there are five key question types when it comes to web surveys. One thought remains: what difference does it make which question type I choose? In fact, it makes a big difference.

Question type determines the analysis you can perform on the data you receive, whether you're working on a training evaluation, satisfaction survey or customer service feedback form.

Consider the following table, which outlines the types of analysis allowed for by different question types:



You'll notice as you move up the table, you can perform more mathematical operations and types of analysis.

It's important to always keep in mind the whole picture of your survey, from start to finish. What types of analysis do you want to do with your data, and what kinds of reports will you need to present after the survey is closed? The answers to these questions should weigh heavily in the design of your survey questions.

It’s likely you’ve heard about the 80-20 Rule, which states that 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its client base.

The implication is pretty straightforward: to maximize profits, a company needs to retain its best customers. Especially during times of economic difficulty, businesses need to strategically maximize focus on this base of profitable opportunities.

For many organizations, the key lies in implementing a customer satisfaction campaign. Such a campaign requires effective customer satisfaction questionnaires, user satisfaction surveys and customer service feedback plans to help understand the dimensions of satisfaction that mean the most to your company. Also essential is an action plan for using this customer analysis in ways that will increase revenue from renewal business, cross-sells and installed base opportunities.

Cvent has published a white paper to help managers and C-level executives learn about how to maximize bottom line profits by retaining a company’s best customers through a comprehensive customer satisfaction program. The white paper is available at Cvent’s Survey Resource page.